Portrait of a Young Man

By 1656, when this was painted, Michiel Sweerts had come back from Rome to his native Brussels and set up a drawing academy, one of the first north of the Alps to work from live models and casts. The young man here, chin propped on his hand, wears the old pose of melancholy, the look of someone caught mid-thought rather than posing for a picture. Scholars have long wondered whether Sweerts was painting himself. What is certain is what came next. Within a decade he gave up painting entirely, joined a French missionary expedition, and died in Goa, on the coast of India, still in his forties. That soft, inward mood is the thing he did best and rarely explained.